Wednesday, 16 September 2015

Bacteria fashioned to produce X-rays

A
research consortium have stated that they have fashioned bacteria to produce
X-rays.

This
was through a study whereby a femtosecond, infrared, high intensity laser
irradiating a glass slide coated with Escherichia
coli was conducted. The effect of the laser was to turn the cell material
into a hot, dense plasma.

The
research group discovered that natural micro and nanostructures in the bacteria
can be used for such intensity enhancement leading to hotter, brighter plasma.
They showed that the bacterial cells increased the X-ray flux by a factor of
100 in the 50 -- 300 keV x-ray region.

After
this they grew the bacterial cells in a silver chloride solution whereby the
silver atoms aggregated as nanoparticles inside the cell. This allowed the
bacteria spiked with nanoparticles to be used to boost the emission a further
100 times, leading to an overall enhancement of 10,000 times from the flux
emitted by plain glass slides without the bacterial coating.

The
finding could potentially lead to biological led plasma physics and high energy
density science for creating novel particle sources.

The
study was carried out at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai and
Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhi Nagar. The research has been published in the journal Optics
Express, in a paper headed “Enhanced x-ray emission from nano-particle doped
bacteria.”